living in london you forget how de-sensitised you become to the noise, pollution and general chaos that whips around you while you go on about your daily business. after 6 weeks in australia – two of which were spent on the idyllic, sun-kissed shores of the great barrier reef – re-immersion into the big smoke was an audio-visual-olfactory onslaught.

in just the week since returning, i witnessed a fire in soho that took about 70 firemen to extinguish, saw the street by my office get cordoned off with police tape after someone got hit by a car and either died or broke a leg no one’s quite sure, accidentally stepped in someone’s rejected late-night kebab, and got my toes stamped on HARD twice on different buses.

but i also hopped on a boat down the thames to see a pet shop boys and little boots gig, perused sculptures of inflatable toys at the serpentine, had a late-night dinner with girlfriends, went to a hip hop circus on the south bank, danced into the night in a friend’s garden after playing pass the parcel and beating a pinata into oblivion, spent a sunday submerged in three papers, and saw a fella selling cardboard ice cream cones out of a cardboard ice cream van in crouch end.